Funding agencies are slowly catching up with the citizen science movement. In today’s post, I round up some sources for citizen science grants and other funding sites to help you or your organization get a project off the ground. If you have additional US grant sources, or grants available in other regions around the world, please contact me and I’ll add them here!

Crowdfunding is all the rage these days, and with good reason: it allows people to directly fund projects that they care about. The latest entry in the science crowdfunding arena is Microryza.

This website suggests that the average researcher spends 12 weeks a year writing grants, and that 80% of these applications are rejected.That’s a lot of time spent… not doing science.

When you donate to at Microryza, you receive updates directly from the researchers to see how they work and see how your donation helped. Current projects open for donations include a student-designed and built electric race car, a Magellanic penguin tracking initiative, and a project designed to eradicate human intestinal hookworms.

It’s not all fun and lab coats for the working scientist: in fact, you’d probably be surprised at how little time researchers get to spend at the bench. This is partly because they have to dedicate a lot of time to looking for money.

As government funding is increasingly subject to politics and budget cuts, scientists have begun looking for new sources of cash. The most obvious place to look for additional money is the business world; however, without careful navigation and proper safeguards, this can lead to accusations of financially-motivated bias in research results. Charitable organizations can raise money from the public for health-related research, but this leaves out many other worthwhile projects, and there are perennial concerns about how much funding actually goes to science versus how much goes to administrative overhead.

More recently, some researchers have started looking at new funding models, by making use of the Internet to solicit money directly from members of the public. The website Sciflies.org is one such attempt to just that. The site’s tagline is “Make Science Happen” and it encourages members of the public to make donations directly to specific studies. For example, in the psychology section, you can donate to a study on the brain changes associated with compulsive hoarding, and for the engineering buffs, there’s a study about ancient embankments.

As this is the era of social media, the site also offers way to share specific projects on platforms like Facebook, so you can encourage your friends to donate too.

Cutting out the middle man with crowdfunding. (Photo credit: SciFund site screenshot)

Budget cuts. Political agendas. These are just some of the words that strike fear into the hearts of researchers world wide. Why? Because researchers have to spend huge chunks of their time hustling for money to fund their studies, and hundreds, if not thousands of projects get shelved every year because the funding dries up.

While governments and charitable foundations do their best to keep the cash flowing, some researchers are experimenting with a new funding model. If you’ve heard of Kickstarter or RocketHub, you already know the premise of the SciFund Challenge: researchers describe their project on a public website, and anyone with an interest and a few dollars can donate directly to the effort. So far, the SciFund Challenge, in association with RocketHub, has raised more than $176,000 in two rounds for various projects, and organizers are hoping for more as the concept catches on.

You can view a list of the completed SciFund projects here, and while you’re waiting for the next challenge to be presented, you can check out the open, independent science projects on RocketHub (which include an effort to protect Darwin’s Finches) and the open research and innovation projects.